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Youth Area at the Border
International competition for ideas for the redevelopment of the former civil hospital – Gorizia
Luca Diffuse / writing extended explanations. 2nd listed
The task was the reclamation of two disused hospitals and other smaller structures, scattered around a 16-hectare park in Gorizia, on the Slovenian border. Every time I happen to find myself in a city I don't know, it's places like this I look for. That's how I find the most interesting neighborhoods. And that's why, in this case, everything was already pretty much fine: a lot of space, plus the abandoned buildings creating an atmosphere.
I imagined having a walk along the perimeter of the biggest ones. Try and picture standing next to something like 20,000 empty square meters. Maybe leaving the sidewalk to reach another building, crossing a field of wild grass.
With this vision in mind I put together a project that leaves park and buildings undisturbed. I liked them the way they were.
I thought this place was fit to become a creative district. I wrote down an unusually detailed program about that, but the project addressed different needs. I wanted the park to be always open. No fences, you need to bring the people in.
The idea was to proceed by different phases, maybe starting from cheap and image-oriented interventions to keep the place appealing and lively. Playgrounds, quiet spots to meet and have a drink, very simple sheltered spaces with a vague – and, for this reason, versatile - purpose. I also needed to define ways to establish a continuous presence in both the buildings and the park. Usually people who start a creative enterprise in this kind of places need a lot of room to work and have meetings, but their private life is limited to a bed and a laptop.
Designing small structures to provide such a blend of technology and intimacy, by colonizing the empty spaces in the hospitals, seemed to be the right solution. For the park, though, in order to fit the diverse “hospitality tactics” envisioned in the general project, we needed slightly bigger structures.
In tune with its lo-fi attitude, the project focused on few well-defined elements, maintaining the overall scale ambiguous and undetermined.
When I talk about low definition, the image in my head kind of looks like the photo above, by Rasa Staniunaite: a slightly blurry background and something more or less clear in the foreground. A rather good representation of the relationship between the few focal points examined (intimacy, technology) and the blurrier elements around them (the park and the warehouses). These two different areas define a narrative possibility that really works – as opposed to a graphic design or a story maintaining the same density throughout, with every sentence polished to perfection. The latter might be a good exercise in style, but it's boring. It doesn't evoke that much, as if the excessive content definition didn't offer room for other possibilities.
There is an emotional reason, too: I have some problems with overly explicit representations. You don't understand what is important and what is not, where the story goes. It seems to me that accepting to make your work a bit dirtier, maybe leaving it slightly unfinished, is a simple way to make things work.
“He has a self defeating habit of attenuating a perfect performance. I think that is what this album was sort of addressing, that psychological tendency to automatically shoot yourself in the foot. I think he's brilliant, of course, and the indie spirit I so love in him is, in part, that self doubting mechanism that keeps one honest.” (YouTube comment to something by Stephen Malkmus)
I just feel it's polite not to always express yourself completely, even if your ideas are clear.
On a less emotional note, low definition is a tactic responding to the seemingly unavoidable disproportion between funding and tasks. A low budget forces you to be smart, to look for localized solutions, and to leave the rest in what we might aesthetically call an “evocative” condition, but also – more honestly – a totally unresolved one. Thing is, that unresolved part works great, at least 90% of the time.
In the end, an incomplete and imperfect project leaves the space's “atmosphere capital” intact, selling you a narrative about what might happen.